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3 New Defendants Named In MP3s4free.net Case
As reported in The Australian, three new respondents have been named in the mp3s4free.net link site case, including an employee of the ISP which is said to have hosted the site. The music industry says that ISP employees will be targeted in the future, but given an amnesty if they "inform the music industry."
Now it's illegal to _LINK_ to websites that have content that _MAY_ infringe on someone's copyrights?
And what law makes that illegal? The DMCA?
I RTFA and it appeared to be that an ISP and specific employees are being sued because one customer put up links to some files that might breach copyright. Can't say I agree with the music industry on this one.
Certainly, if every copied MP3 or other media is a 1:1 correlation with a lost album sale, and every "shared" MP3 is responsible for hundreds of lost sales, then one city BUS must then be responsible for the loss of the sale of 40-60 automobiles?
And further, for every car not sold, there is also a loss in license plate fees, gasoline sold. toll road fees and parking fees.
Seems like that would be a perfect test case as the names of cars are copyrighted, as are certain design details, and of course, the purchaser must hold a "license" to operate it on the road.
Oh, wait, some bus riders own cars and some car owners ride the bus!
Maybe there is some truth to the idea that the acquisition of shared downloads has an impact on media sales, but it is obviously not of the magnitude the bastards claim.
We are required by law to be able to log sufficient information to associate IPs with customers if informed to do so by authorities. We may well be required (waiting for legal counsel answer) to keep these logs for several years. Not doing so may lead to criminal charges. By the way, incompetence and lack of resources aren't a defense any more than your cheap-ass landlord can get away with "but those smoke detectors are so pricey".
Not logging customer data is ultimately more expensive to us anyway. When AOL emails us up and says "67.32.1.1 is spamming, drop them or we drop you", a hundred bucks for a RADIUS log drive suddenly looks cheap compared to two fscking weeks of losing customers while I call their incompetent support line to get out of their blacklist.
The whole usenet thing is problematic, although the issue isn't piracy, it's kiddy porn. Usenet admins have been arguing about whether a common carrier defense would work for as long as I can remember. Fortunately, thus far no Usenet providers (or ISPs for that matter) have been charged that I know of, the authorities seem much more interested in the people who post this filth than in us. They change newsgroups regularly, and tracking readers isn't as trivial as grepping RADIUS logs, we'd basically have to monitor every newsgroup.
But if advised to do so we'll drop our news server faster than you can blink, and our customers can go to giganews et al where they have deep pockets. I'm not going to prison just so you can read alt.binaries.kinko-the-clown or whatever they're using these days. But beyond that, I don't personally give a rodent's posterior whether you're sharing the entire first season of Gilligan's Island on gnutella and sucking a month's worth of alt.binaries.mp3s.circle-jerks, as long as you don't saturate the DLSAM and we don't get a subpoena.
Don't like it? Use an anonymizer, find an open wireless access point, run freenet, and/or pull a full newsfeed (oh and have you priced OC3s lately? cuz that's what you'll need for a full feed).
BTW, you're largely right about the economics of smaller ISPs, although many of them seem to forget that customer service is ultimately the most important part of the business.